The motto here is Trust but Monitor. Trust in that there there is some, but not much software that blocks prohibited sites so we need to trust the kids to make good choices. We've been doing this since they were about 4 or 5 - this doesn't happen over night. They're not likely at this point to bypass the security I've set up, but I'll leave that open to the possibility in the future.
We use this approach in our house with teens using a Linksys router. I set up access permissions by MAC address for the kids computers. Our other computers use for work and my wife are all password protected. I disallow internet access between 11 pm and 6 am generally, and occasionally block some sites if they prove to be problematic.
The computers run Vista and we use the basic internet filter provided to restrict content to porn sites (though this is inadequate). Parents have the right to inspect the computers at any time (plus we keep an eye on social sites and the router logs). The kids have a 6 page "Acceptable Use Contract" with us (their eyes went wide when they saw this) and we've had only 2 violations in several years where access was 100% denied for a week. In one case, I just shut off internet access without saying anything and left a new copy of the AUP on their bed. It took two weeks for that child to come to me to apologize and renew the contract. Earned trust is a powerful thing and they realize its cost when it is lost.
I've been following some Game UI's. So far I like Facebook Mafia Wars as its all HTML/Javascript and good but simple artwork. The others have been either custom graphics/Java work or Flash based.
Its been interesting to watch the incremental improvements as they streamline the game work flow. It's all point and click so I'm not sure how well this would translate to a business UI.
Now i just need a paying customer to fund some great UI development for an internal business app. But it has to be lean enough to work in a WAN and support at least 500 users from a single web server front end.
The closest I've seen to a slick corporate UI all in Cold Fusion is at a medical services company that reinvented itself in 2000 by snapping up lots of dot com developers.
http://slashdot.org/~peterofoz/journal/230553
I'm frustrated. Why can't business apps be designed to have GUI's that are as slick and clean as a game? One issue to overcome is the screen real estate taken up by graphics and chrome. Also, business apps design should include a configuration management tool; hand editing web.config files should be in the past.
I'd use the Lego Mindstorms robotics set, with an NXT processor. That way, the programming results are more tangible and you can solve just about any problem likely to come up in a programming contest with it. For some fun, check out the First Lego League challenges. http://www.firstlegoleague.org/
A couple of reasons why they might be so expensive:
Insurance (or Social Security) will pay
Lack of competition
Low volumes
I think you are right that there is no really good reason anymore for why these should be so expensive. The reason 20 years ago might have been state of the art electronics and cost of miniaturization. Looks like its time for an open source hardware project, just watch your step on the patents.
A quick search shows Walmart selling hearing aids for about $400
California is busy vying for the title of 'Most Nanny State' with New York. That's why everything is more expensive here. Public and private space smoking bans, automobile requirements, trash sorting, micromanaged school curriculum, the list goes on and on.
Now go brush your teeth, don't salt your food, and put air in your tires.
The dead body on the floor with the bullet wound died of a brain aneurysm 2 days before while sitting at the kitchen table, but caught a stray bullet through the window from a gang fight in the streets of Berkeley which knocked him/her on the floor. Police tracking the bullet exchange via the broken window made the grim discovery.
They keep changing the question. Remember that the root question is: Is Global Warming cause by Human Activity?
Global climate has been warmer, and cooler in the past, with a good chance that these were caused by astronomical events like solar activity and asteroid impacts.
Perhaps we should ask a new question: Is AGW fanaticism created by the need to be needed, and fueled by money and control?
We've been down this road a couple of times with our kids being bullied at school. In nearly all cases, I'd judge that the bully kids were the ones with the social problems. Here are a few case studies from 4th to 6th grade:
Girl bully is only child with a single mom who is dating. Bio father was an abusive jerk as was at least one of mom's boyfriends. Mom is very sensible. We had parents and youth meet and talk it over for what is acceptable and what is not. Invited the girl over for a weekend and had a great time - now the girls are good friends.
Seriously obese 6th grade boy bully is only child with parents of middle eastern origin. Father is a real jerk so there's little hope for the kid. Stay clear of this one - he's trouble.
Only child boy bully with widowed mom gets aggressive when hanging out with my son and another friend. They're ok when its just 2 of them. Jealousy and competition for attention is driving this. Mom is very nice, also lives with aunt and 3 female cats. Invited him camping with the boy scouts for some serious guy time - had great fun.
Upshot is that the kids being bullied need to build self confidence and know which relationships can be fixed, and which ones can't. Bullies are typically insecure, jealous, or lonely and this is how they feel empowered.
We can see this in adults as well. Typically its the momma bear personality,though sometimes not. Discussion on their secret need to be dominated and disciplined is a topic for another forum.
Yup, i too am a frequent scanner of news article teasers and headlines and don't click through because, frankly, they don't interest me or I've already read them. I also drive down the street past 1000's of store fronts, advertising banners and billboards and don't often stop to buy stuff. I see 1000's of web adverts every day and don't click on those either (or very rarely). I would tell you what I'd like to read, exactly, except I don't often know myself until the fancy strikes me. And it changes from day to day. So keep spamming the news headlines out there and hope to catch a few readers with what they need when they need it.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is an 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott. Writing pseudonymously as "a square" [1], Abbott used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to offer pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture.
Large corporations often standardize workstation setups in an effort to:
reduced cost of the help desk support
simplified license compliance
standardized platform for enterprise integration
remote support and monitoring
improved security and antivirus
Developers usually need admin rights to a workstation or VM somewhere in order to develop and integrate applications. For our last project we used COE workstations and developed our apps on a VMware, then used the COE environment to test functionality. We ended up needing admin rights to 1 'dirty' workstation since our integration was going to require a change to the COE, but we kept the rest clean.
The funny but sad part was the COE was not as standardized as we were led to believe with COE workstations sporting different versions of Java and IE which caused some interesting problems.
You've got to be kidding. So why stop with heath? Let's include sexual preferences and orientation, religious and social affiliations, and stereotypes based on where you live.
Great question. Got me to thinking there must be an Eclipse or Firefox plugin for that. Found a few I'll have to check out now. MyLyn looks promising from IBM http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mylyn1/ though it seems to more programming oriented than what you do.
Set up a quick Drupal http://www.drupal.org/ site with pages you can privately blog to as an online notebook. Use Time Tracker in Firefox to track time on each task page.
This was a fairly early implementation of a virtual museum with a fun/scary game when the T-Rex comes calling ala Night In The Museum.
Use this as a minimum standard since my kids played with this about 10 years ago.
Might also look around/prototype your museum and interactions in Second Life.
We already have a platform to do this - BOINC. We've been wasting megawatts on SETI for years. Perhaps we should turn the search closer to home and just search for terrestrial intelligence, but that could be equally futile.
The content engines like IBM/FileNet are set up to manage millions of documents. Many also have the ability to add remote cache servers to improve local performance for repeat document access in satellite offices. Contact Dave at Softech-assoc.com if you need help.
Slashdot Mirror
I burst out in a profane tirade yelling at no-one in the room. Now I'm light sensitive to the color blue and I might have post-traumatic stress.
Do you think I have a claim on Microsoft?
`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - - that's all.'
--Alice in Wonderland
The motto here is Trust but Monitor. Trust in that there there is some, but not much software that blocks prohibited sites so we need to trust the kids to make good choices. We've been doing this since they were about 4 or 5 - this doesn't happen over night. They're not likely at this point to bypass the security I've set up, but I'll leave that open to the possibility in the future.
We use this approach in our house with teens using a Linksys router. I set up access permissions by MAC address for the kids computers. Our other computers use for work and my wife are all password protected. I disallow internet access between 11 pm and 6 am generally, and occasionally block some sites if they prove to be problematic. The computers run Vista and we use the basic internet filter provided to restrict content to porn sites (though this is inadequate). Parents have the right to inspect the computers at any time (plus we keep an eye on social sites and the router logs). The kids have a 6 page "Acceptable Use Contract" with us (their eyes went wide when they saw this) and we've had only 2 violations in several years where access was 100% denied for a week. In one case, I just shut off internet access without saying anything and left a new copy of the AUP on their bed. It took two weeks for that child to come to me to apologize and renew the contract. Earned trust is a powerful thing and they realize its cost when it is lost.
Richard Branson will soon be announcing a budget Virgin Galactic New Mexico Spaceport to ISS with all the style of Virgin Atlantic.
Its been interesting to watch the incremental improvements as they streamline the game work flow. It's all point and click so I'm not sure how well this would translate to a business UI.
Now i just need a paying customer to fund some great UI development for an internal business app. But it has to be lean enough to work in a WAN and support at least 500 users from a single web server front end.
The closest I've seen to a slick corporate UI all in Cold Fusion is at a medical services company that reinvented itself in 2000 by snapping up lots of dot com developers.
http://slashdot.org/~peterofoz/journal/230553 I'm frustrated. Why can't business apps be designed to have GUI's that are as slick and clean as a game? One issue to overcome is the screen real estate taken up by graphics and chrome. Also, business apps design should include a configuration management tool; hand editing web.config files should be in the past.
I'd use the Lego Mindstorms robotics set, with an NXT processor. That way, the programming results are more tangible and you can solve just about any problem likely to come up in a programming contest with it. For some fun, check out the First Lego League challenges. http://www.firstlegoleague.org/
I think you are right that there is no really good reason anymore for why these should be so expensive. The reason 20 years ago might have been state of the art electronics and cost of miniaturization. Looks like its time for an open source hardware project, just watch your step on the patents.
A quick search shows Walmart selling hearing aids for about $400
and add to that liberals who moderate you as a Troll for having Libertarian views.
California is busy vying for the title of 'Most Nanny State' with New York. That's why everything is more expensive here. Public and private space smoking bans, automobile requirements, trash sorting, micromanaged school curriculum, the list goes on and on.
Now go brush your teeth, don't salt your food, and put air in your tires.
This 7 ft tall automatic dice roller reads the rolls with a camera and laptop and serves them for game play. http://gizmodo.com/5270195/automatic-dice-machine-records-13-million-rolls-a-day
The dead body on the floor with the bullet wound died of a brain aneurysm 2 days before while sitting at the kitchen table, but caught a stray bullet through the window from a gang fight in the streets of Berkeley which knocked him/her on the floor. Police tracking the bullet exchange via the broken window made the grim discovery.
They keep changing the question. Remember that the root question is: Is Global Warming cause by Human Activity? Global climate has been warmer, and cooler in the past, with a good chance that these were caused by astronomical events like solar activity and asteroid impacts. Perhaps we should ask a new question: Is AGW fanaticism created by the need to be needed, and fueled by money and control?
We've been down this road a couple of times with our kids being bullied at school. In nearly all cases, I'd judge that the bully kids were the ones with the social problems. Here are a few case studies from 4th to 6th grade:
Upshot is that the kids being bullied need to build self confidence and know which relationships can be fixed, and which ones can't. Bullies are typically insecure, jealous, or lonely and this is how they feel empowered.
We can see this in adults as well. Typically its the momma bear personality,though sometimes not. Discussion on their secret need to be dominated and disciplined is a topic for another forum.
Yup, i too am a frequent scanner of news article teasers and headlines and don't click through because, frankly, they don't interest me or I've already read them. I also drive down the street past 1000's of store fronts, advertising banners and billboards and don't often stop to buy stuff. I see 1000's of web adverts every day and don't click on those either (or very rarely). I would tell you what I'd like to read, exactly, except I don't often know myself until the fancy strikes me. And it changes from day to day. So keep spamming the news headlines out there and hope to catch a few readers with what they need when they need it.
I vote for a 3-d version of Flatland
http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~banchoff/Flatland/
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is an 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott. Writing pseudonymously as "a square" [1], Abbott used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to offer pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
Large corporations often standardize workstation setups in an effort to:
Developers usually need admin rights to a workstation or VM somewhere in order to develop and integrate applications. For our last project we used COE workstations and developed our apps on a VMware, then used the COE environment to test functionality. We ended up needing admin rights to 1 'dirty' workstation since our integration was going to require a change to the COE, but we kept the rest clean.
The funny but sad part was the COE was not as standardized as we were led to believe with COE workstations sporting different versions of Java and IE which caused some interesting problems.
You've got to be kidding. So why stop with heath? Let's include sexual preferences and orientation, religious and social affiliations, and stereotypes based on where you live.
Great question. Got me to thinking there must be an Eclipse or Firefox plugin for that. Found a few I'll have to check out now. MyLyn looks promising from IBM http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mylyn1/ though it seems to more programming oriented than what you do.
For FireFox, maybe Quick ToDo list https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11386 or Time Tracker https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1887
Set up a quick Drupal http://www.drupal.org/ site with pages you can privately blog to as an online notebook. Use Time Tracker in Firefox to track time on each task page.
I dunno - just made all this up.
This was a fairly early implementation of a virtual museum with a fun/scary game when the T-Rex comes calling ala Night In The Museum. Use this as a minimum standard since my kids played with this about 10 years ago. Might also look around/prototype your museum and interactions in Second Life.
We already have a platform to do this - BOINC. We've been wasting megawatts on SETI for years. Perhaps we should turn the search closer to home and just search for terrestrial intelligence, but that could be equally futile.
The slashdot post below: "HTML 5 Canvas Experiment Hints At Things To Come" connects to Twitter for its canvas demonstration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager
The content engines like IBM/FileNet are set up to manage millions of documents. Many also have the ability to add remote cache servers to improve local performance for repeat document access in satellite offices. Contact Dave at Softech-assoc.com if you need help.